Friday, August 27, 2010

I Get Knocked Down

Yeah, when's the last time you heard or thought of that Chumbawamba song? He might be singing about still being able to stagger home after another drunken chugger at the neighborhood pub, but we understand the wider applications of the theme. I see it as the rallying cry for all people engaged in somewhat trivial pursuits and encountering equally trivial setbacks. "I Will Survive" for those facing not heartbreak but a broken nail, not cancer but a paper cut.

Take some of the metaphorical paper cuts I've received as a writer in the last couple weeks:
(1) The friend's husband who burst out laughing at a pool party when he found my books were self-published. "Oh--you're self-published! You're self-published!" Translation: your work is the literary equivalent of asking people to watch slides from your month-long vacation.

(2) Having someone buy my book on Kindle and then return it. Seriously. MOURNING BECOMES CASSANDRA costs only $2.99 on Kindle, and they hated it so much they took the time to return it???

(3) Some feedback from one of my older readers: "Being almost 80 and growing up and dating when I was 16 or 17 and marrying at 18, my experience with love life was so different from the women in the book, I can hardly relate to them." So I shouldn't send her my work-in-progress about the Martian Hip-Hop Singer who becomes a Coal Miner?

(4) Children's hardback books are stinking expensive to produce. Unless you go to China and print 5,000, but even if you get the cost down to $3.50 a book, that's still $17,500, so forget it.

(5) Two book club cancellations for me in September. Possibly because one of the women read MBC, vomited all over her Kindle, and is now suing the hostess for damages.

Like I said, they were not big deals in the Grand Scheme of Things, though every time I see that return listed in my Kindle reports the paper cut is ripped open again. I wonder, am I tanking like the Edward toilet stickers?

But no! I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down. There are plus sides to the ledger, which I must cling to:

+ King County Library System ordered eight copies of THE LITTLEST DOUBTS. Not quite sure how their system works because there are 20+ holds on four copies of MBC and only four holds on TLD. Wouldn't they be better served ordering four more copies of MBC and only four copies of TLD? Oh, well. Ours is not to reason why.

+ In the month of August MBC has sold 59 Kindle copies to date, and those 59 readers have not yet clamored for their money back.

+ The kids go back to school Monday morning. Which means I can be sitting at my computer writing by 9:00. Or, to paraphrase Chumbawamba, I can get back to pissing my day away. Hooray!

Writer, creative consultant, speaker, pastor's wife, and farmers market addict.
The Seattle Times called Christina's THE BERESFORDS "ingenious and entertaining," and Austenprose.com urged, "...If you read only one traditional Regency this year, let it be THE NATURALIST."
As the UrbanFarmJunkie, she is the official blogger of the Bellevue Farmers Market.